Published in July 1881, Dawn (or Daybreak) was a Genoa book. Though he had begun the preparatory sketches a year and a half earlier in Riva, and had continued them in Venice and Stresa, the book itself came into being in Genoa: ‘Almost every sentence was thought, was tracked down, among the confusion of rocks near Genoa’. It is the concluding work of Nietzsche's positivist period.

A Book for Slow Readers

As with Human, All-Too-Human, Dawn is once again, clearly, a book that is addressed to ‘free spirits’, potential and actual. It is addressed to a ‘company of thinkers’, to, that is, ‘we adventurers and birds of passage [Wandervögel]’; we who resist current customs and conventions and so are denounced by the mainstream as ‘criminals, free-thinkers, immoral persons’ and ‘put under the ban of outlawry [Vogelfreiheit]’. As in Human, Nietzsche senses the gathering of a movement of life-reform: ‘at the present time…those who do not regard themselves as bound by existing laws and customs are making the first attempts to organise themselves and therewith to create for themselves a right’. This movement he wishes to encourage and guide, even though, with the collapse of the old morality, ‘it may make the coming century a dangerous one in which it will be necessary to carry guns’. At present, he observes, there are in Europe ‘perhaps ten to twenty million people who no longer “believe in God” ’, so they should ‘give a sign to one another’ in order to become an organized ‘power in Europe’.